


The Clean Up

by MaxKowarth



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Crash Landing, Friendship, Minor Character Death, Originally Posted on LiveJournal, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-14
Updated: 2020-10-14
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:34:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27014359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaxKowarth/pseuds/MaxKowarth
Summary: The Doctor and a reluctant Donna come to the aid of a crashed Star ship, but are they in time?
Kudos: 2





	The Clean Up

Smoke poured around the cramped cabin. The lights on the heads up display flickered and died.  
In the pneumatic seat the pilot raised a fist and slammed it into the emergency control above his head.  
The blast shield lowered and through the starred canopy he could make out the edges of the island as he plunged earthwards. With his instruments so badly damaged there was no way of telling what island. He hoped it wasn’t too heavily inhabited.

Doctor Who  
Starring  
The Doctor  
& Donna Noble

The Clean Up by Paul J Guest

It was early morning on Caldwell Farm. Isobella stood patiently chewing at her breakfast.  
Her friends had been excited the night before, keeping everyone awake with their noise. But not her, she knew there was very little she could do about anything going on outside until the morning.  
Now here they all were and whatever had kept them up seemed, in the cold light of day, to be rather unremarkable.  
Unless you counted its appearance in the field as remarkable.  
Isobella didn’t, time passed, things moved. That had always been the case here.

Isobella remained undisturbed until sometime just before lunch.  
Then the field with the new thing in gained a second new thing. A tall blue new thing with a flashing light on top.  
Not that it mattered to her, she was a cow. But she decided to keep an eye on it, just in case it decided to do anything funny.

-

Donna joined the Doctor as he stared into the field.  
The sun shone, birds sang and Donna wondered if she should have bothered with the umbrella he'd insisted she bring. 'So? What we looking at?'  
'The spaceship' he replied gravely. She looked back at the empty field.  
'You what?''  
'The spaceship. There!' he pointed emphatically towards a rather bemused cow peering into the field from the other side. 

“ 'ave you finally lost it?'  
'What?'  
'I'm asking if you've gone mad spaceman! There’s no spaceship THERE!'  
'Yes there is' he replied patiently  
'No their bleeding well isn't! Watch!' she pushed open the gate, strolled merrily across the field, collided with the spaceship that wasn't there and fell on her arse in the grass.

'That spaceship' The Doctor sighed as he helped her up. She hit him with the umbrella.  
'You could have said it was invisible!'  
“Technically it’s not invisible; it’s just reflecting a wavelength of light that _you_ can’t see.”  
“I told you not to get Smart with me, if I can’t see it then its not visible. **IN** -Visible, got it?”  
“Well, yeah...” The Doctor puffed out his cheeks and blew a wrong footed breath out. “I suppose, if you put it that way...” 

“What’s the point of that, I mean how are you supposed to fly it if the controls are all see through?”  
The Doctor opened his mouth to reply, winced, and scratched the back of his neck while he found a tactful way of phrasing it then just went with it. “It’s not invisible on the inside.”  
Donna pulled a face and pointed at the ground with both her index fingers “Then what are we doing on the OUTSIDE!”  
“Trying to get in? Now, will you stop nattering at me and try to find the door?”  
“Why not use your sonic doodah to just break in like you normally do?”  
“You make me sound like a career criminal” he grinned at her before returning his attention to the grass around them. With a sharp ‘aha!’ he then shot off around the edge of the field to stand smiling at an equally uninteresting piece of sky. “Come on then!” he urged her, and then vanished from sight.

Donna waited nearly 3 full minutes before she followed him around the field, waving the umbrella like a white cane to avoid colliding with the potential vessel. When she made it to the point that the Time Lord’s footprints vanished she realised what he had been looking for. There was a large dent in the ground where the door opened into it. The Doctor’s scarlet converse dangled in mid air so she hooked the umbrella handle around one skinny ankle.  
He dropped nimbly to the ground after the sharp pull, his face grave. “It’s worse than I thought” he told her.  
“Don’t tell me, flocked wallpaper” she grinned and pushed past him. 

-

The doorway opened into a narrow tunnel that ran the length of the ship.  
A bunk was tucked into the wall to her left and pointed towards the controls. Was it still a flight deck on something this small or was it a cockpit?  
The lighting at that end of the corridor was dark brown, as though it couldn’t quite manage red alert. To her right the corridor led to a heavily bolted doorway covered in what she assumed to be warning labels. There was a smell in here that she didn’t associate with farms.  
”it don’t half pong in here, you think one of them cows...” The Doctor reappeared at her side and coughed. 

She looked up at him, saw the grim set of his eyes and suddenly knew what the smell, and the bad lighting meant.  
“Oh god...”  
“I’m Sorry, I’m so sorry”  
“But the spaceships in one piece... i mean, there wasn’t a crash or anything?”  
The Doctor sniffed and sighed “Ahh well, I’d say that there was a fire in the cockpit in orbit, dropped to earth, pulverising the pilot and then the safety contacts kicked in to drop the ship to a safe landing.” 

Donna moved closer to the flight seat, curiosity overwhelming her.  
“Wrong, I may not be a spaceman but I know a whole body when I see one.”  
“This is a Chula scout vessel; I’ve seen a few of them. They have auto repair systems for the ship... and the crew”  
“You mean they put the corpse back together, after...” she glanced up at the light and saw the thin spray that marked the truth of the Doctor’s words. 

Her hand flew to her mouth instinctively. She felt the Doctor’s hands on her shoulders pulling her away, back towards the door.  
“Come on, wait down here. I just have to tell the computer to leave the planet. Find its way home or something.”  
“Why us? Why can’t those burly UNIT fella’s sort out this sort of thing?” she kept her gaze on the grass outside the door and tried not to listen to the noises from the Doctor’s work. 

“A few good reasons, best not to let them have a warship, they’d only want to take it apart.” There was a whine of power as something turned over. “Plus Yorkshire’s not known for easy access to International Military agencies and...” there was a thump of feet as he ran towards her. Taking the hint she jumped through the door only for him to land on top of her. She had time for an irate ‘OI!’ before the ground screamed and the sky lifted. 

Donna valiantly tried to return her hair to the clip that had held it.  
The Doctor brushed grass from his suit and went over to talk to the bemused looking cow.  
“And?” Donna prompted her eyes still on the space where the spaceship wasn’t, just in case it hadn’t left at all.  
“And its 1637”  
“UNIT on a tea break 'til 5 or something?”  
“No, the Year 1637!” he wandered calmly back across to her, took her arm and led her back to the TARDIS. “Where to next then?”


End file.
